Half way through Triadvent, I really didn’t want to get a boring triad. For me, in this challenge, I didn’t want to draw a CMY or RYB triad. Painting with one of those triads isn’t a challenge. It’s possible to color match a lot of things. This is useful for a limited palette for everyday use, but for me no fun in a color challenge.
I started my color studies sketchbook with these boring triads. They are certainly very flexible and it’s hard to show off the possibilities in only one painting. I had a lot of ideas for different variations of CMY or RYB triads. But I never really started to explore them. Overall they are more useful than interesting.
Another kind of boring is when the colors don’t spark joy and even in hindsight don’t look interesting. This particular triad you see in the picture below also falls into the „impossible“ category from my previous blog post with not many variations in hue and not so many possibilities to paint dark values. I didn’t feel inspired by the colors and I don’t feel confident about the painting.
And then there are color combinations that were boring in Triadvent because I got them repeatedly. I was pretty annoyed when my last triad (picture below) had another brown with another yellow. These mixes are not exciting anymore. I know these brownish yellows all too well by now, especially the mixes with earth oranges such as this one.
Conclusion
When a triad is boring, it may be because you know the colors so well. On other occasions you may just not like the color combination.
When I happened to pick such a triad, by the end of December I learned to look for the most interesting color(s) in that triad. And then I painted with it, no matter if the painted subject has the correct color in reality or not. With the above triad, it was the blue and the luminous turquoise that were catching my eye. Again the overall conclusion is that it’s still possible to paint something pretty with every triad, but you may look a bit harder to find something that sparks joy. And of course – a boring triad is certainly very subjective – what is boring to me might be interesting for you!